"Metre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comes? I cannot bring myself to discard inkstone and brush; Now and then I make a new poem. When the poem is made, it is slight and flavourless, A thing of derision to almost every one. Superior people will be pained at the flatness of the metre; Common people will hate the plainness of the words. I sing it to myself, then stop and think about ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... "By Jupiter, Socrates, you have done well in reminding me. With respect to the poems which you made, by putting into metre those Fables of AEsop and the hymn to Apollo, several other persons asked me, and especially Evenus recently, with what design you made them after you came here, whereas before, you had never made any. If, therefore, you care at all that I should be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... The Eve the real Scott first shows, and the better of the two is the second. It is not merely that, though Scott had a great liking for and much proficiency in 'eights,' that metre is never so effective for ballad purposes as eights and sixes; nor that, as Lockhart admits, Glenfinlas exhibits a Germanisation which is at the same time an adulteration; nor even that, well as Scott knew the Perthshire Highlands, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... this Stromboli of the Athabasca to be the gathering-place of up and down-river wanderers. You can boil a kettle or broil a moose-steak on this gas-jet in six minutes, and there is no thought of accusing metre to mar your joy. The Doctor has found a patient in a cabin on the high bank, and rejoices. The Indian has consumption. The only things the Doctor could get at were rhubarb pills and cod-liver oil, but these, with faith, go a long way. They may have eased the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... extracts to go with "From Massachusetts to Virginia" and "Cassandra Southwick" in my own book, where one of my pleasures will be trying to do justice to American poetry, and Dr. Holmes's fine "Astraea." We have nothing like that nowadays in England. Nobody writes now in the glorious resonant metre of Dryden, and very few ever did write as Dr. Holmes does. I see there is another volume of his poetry, but the name was new to me. How much I owe to you, my dear Mr. Fields! That great romance, "The Scarlet Letter," and these ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Puttenham and of Webbe, the pioneers of Elizabethan criticism, was either to classify writers according to the subjects they treated and the literary form that each had made his own, or to analyse the metre and other more ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... an empty rhymer Who lies with idle elbow on the grass, And fits his singing, like a cunning timer, To all men's prides and fancies as they pass. 60 Not his the song, which, in its metre holy, Chimes with the music of the eternal stars, Humbling the tyrant, lifting up the lowly, And sending sun through the soul's prison-bars. Maker no more,—oh no! unmaker rather, For he unmakes who doth not all put forth The power given freely by our loving Father To show the body's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... ear is soon wearied by a succession of groups identical in length. The prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less harmonious, is condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a larger scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted metre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into his pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; but such is the ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... metre of all kynde ywys This lady blyssed had lust for to playe With her was blesens Richarde pophys Farrose pystyls clere lusty fresshe and gay With maters vere poetes in good array Ovyde, Omer, Vyrgyll, Lucan, Orace Alane, Bernarde, ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... as he went. And conversely (as he would have said) no sensible man would think to improve Newton's Principia and Darwin's Origin of Species by casting them into blank verse; or Euclid's Elements by writing them out in ballad metre— ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... stand ours, it follows that our race is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do bear, the seeds of greater diseases than those the ancients carried with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a metre to gauge the vigour of the constitutions to whose contact he ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... opportunity to say that my translation of BEOWULF, of which the last reprint was issued in 1910, is not in prose, as some have misconceived it, but it is in the same metrical form as the translations in the present volume,—an accentual metre in rough imitation of the original. I agree with Professor Gummere and others that this is a better form for the translation of Old English poetry than plain prose. It was approved by the late Professor Child nearly thirty years ago, as noted in the Preface ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... he terror-stricken, as he had been on his first day in the cavalry, at hearing behind him the thunder of many hoofs. Having once become used to the noise, he was even thrilled by the swinging metre of it. A kind of wild harmony was in it, something which made one forget everything else. At such times Pasha longed to break into his long, wind-splitting lope, but he learned that he must leave the others no more than a pace or two behind, although he could ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... are the names of various "tunes," and signified in each case a particular metre, rhyme, melody, &c, so that each was a brief definition of a number of individual items, so to speak. These Meistersinger technical terms (or slang?) are therefore not translatable, nor could they be made intelligible by ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... innovation on the stereotyped methods appealed to him with the grace and relish of a new metre ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... this sweetness and fluency, the scientific construction of the metre of the 'Faery Queene' is very noticeable. One of Spenser's arts is that of alliteration, and he uses it with great effect in doubling the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... the Apostles translated into Englyshe metre, by Chrystofer Tye, Doctor in musyke, with notes to synge, and also to play upon the lute. Printed by Seres, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of the official clock dropped into its slot somebody called the Naval Observatory. The call was so faint as to be barely audible, in spite of the fact that Hood's instrument was tuned for a three-thousand-metre wave. Supposing quite naturally that the person calling had a shorter wave, he gradually cut out the inductance of his receiver; but the sound faded out entirely, and he returned to his original inductance and shunted in his condenser, upon which the call immediately increased in volume. Evidently ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... And/ Scotch Reviewers./ A Satire./ I had rather be a kitten, and cry, mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers./ Shakspeare./ Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true,/ There are as mad, abandon'd Critics too./ Pope./ London:/ Printed for James Cawthorn, British Library,/ No. 24, Cockspur ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... ideas, and embodying her own ideals of social and moral progress. And to a large extent she succeeded. As a vehicle of her opinions, the scheme and style of the poem proved completely adequate. She moves easily through the story; she handles her metre with freedom and command; she can say her say without exaggeration or unnatural strain. Further, the opinions themselves, as those who have learnt to know her through her letters will feel sure, are lofty and honourable, and full of a genuine ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... are syllables which all singers of the Samans utter for lengthening short words in order to keep up the metre. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... almost every other Victorian poet, he was really two poets. But it is just to him to insist that in his case (unlike Browning's) both the poets were good. The first is more or less like Stevenson in metre; it is a magical luck or skill in the mere choice of words. "Wet sands marbled with moon and cloud"—"Flits by the sea-blue bird of March"—"Leafless ribs and iron horns"—"When the long dun wolds are ribbed with snow"—in all these cases one word is the keystone of an arch ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... other articles on ballooning from the French. It is also interesting that she retained in her translation the original units which Verne used (metre, feet, leagues), a practice forgotten until recently. This may be the first appearance of a work by Jules Verne ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... at fault, If e'er I chance to scribble dope, If that my metre ever halt, I err in company ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... the truth of poor mortality; When lo! as one who, in a mirror, spies The shining of a flambeau at his back, Lit sudden ore he deem of its approach, And turneth to resolve him, if the glass Have told him true, and sees the record faithful As note is to its metre; even thus, I well remember, did befall to me, Looking upon the beauteous eyes, whence love Had made the leash to take me. As I turn'd; And that, which, in their circles, none who spies, Can miss of, in itself apparent, struck On mine; a point I saw, that darted ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... which not only possess the highest merit, but serve to confirm the authenticity of the poems of Ossian, published by Macpherson, so often called in question. All the pieces here attributed to Ossian are written in the same metre, tone, and spirit, as those attributed to him in the other collection, so if Macpherson's Ossianic poems, which he said were collected by him in the Highlands, are forgeries, Smith's Ossianic poems, which, according to his account, were also collected ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... and young women respectively sing "my young son," and, "my young brother:" the metre and rhyme are also very carefully preserved, and the word Kardang is evidently expressly selected for this purpose; for were they speaking in prose they would use a term denoting eldest brother, youngest brother, second brother, or some similar ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... pupils with music. They walk to music, play to music, work to music, obey drill commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music, live to music, get so clearheaded about music that they can move their several limbs each in a different metre until they become complicated living magazines of cross rhythms, and, what is more, make music for others to do all these things to. Stranger still, though Jacques Dalcroze, like all these great teachers, is the completest of tyrants, knowing ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... farmers, free members of the clans, the most important class in the ancient Irish community. Their laws were composed in their contemporary language, the Bearla Feini, a distinct form of Gaelic. Several nations of the Aryan race are known to have cast into metre or rhythmical prose their laws and such other knowledge as they desired to communicate, preserve, and transmit, before writing came into use. The Irish went further and, for greater facility in committing to memory and retaining there, put their laws ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... it. I must not dream my time away,— I 'm sure to rue it. The day is rather bright, I know The Muse will pardon My half-defection, if I go Into the garden. It must be better working there,— I 'm sure it's sweeter: And something in the balmy air May clear my metre. ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... is not confined to the study of Holy Scripture. He speaks of them as searching carefully into the writers of history, as having a knowledge of ancient law and chronography, and in writing, of the rules of grammar and orthography, punctuation, metre, together with the use of allegory and tropology; all of which goes to prove that the field of secular knowledge was not particularly limited for nuns in those days. Aldhelm enlarges on the charms of their peaceful life in the nunnery, and the opportunities for thought and ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney
... which, with all their poverty and stiffness, please me as true, and as representative of the convalescent feeling, I find direct reference to the beliefs which he had laboured to instil. My verses are written in a sort of metre which, in the hands of Collins, became flexible and exquisitely poetic, and which in those of Kirke White is at least pleasing, but of which we find poor enough specimens in the "Anthologies" of Southey, and which perhaps no one so limited in his metrical vocabulary, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... quarter full. That last oil glaze of yours holds the gas something beautiful. He's not lost a cubic metre a week."... ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... works. Let us first look at his varied form of speech, and afterward at his sound knowledge on matters of fact. All poetry grips the hearer by definite order of coordinated expressions, by rhythm and metre, since the smooth and flowing, by becoming at the same time grave and sweet, forces the attention by its action on the senses. Whence it comes to pass also that it delights not only by the striking and attractive parts, but easily persuades by the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... crystal, and separates the waters above the firmament from those below. It is the walking and clinging together that gives power to the winds, weight to the waves, heat to the sunbeams, and stability to the mountains. It is the 'clinging together' which throws our syllables into words, gives metre to poetry, and melody and harmony to sound. Indeed, the clinging together of sounds, as seized by the ear in time, with the ever forming and living ebb and flow of widely different rhythms, exerting the most mysterious influences upon the soul, is not less remarkable than its more familiar ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... down a peaceful spectator of others?[105] The Bacchic and Corybantic dances one can also modulate and quell, by changing the metre from the trochaic and the measure from the Phrygian. Similarly, too, the Pythian priestess, when she descends from her tripod, possesses her soul in peace. Whereas the love-fury, when once it has really ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... and genius, as well as of modesty and shame. To a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve thousand livres in the year—besides a present, in ready money, of one hundred napoleons d'or. Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and sung the chiefs of all former factions, received, for ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... Hinton (Transitional Line) Hillside (Graded Light Upon Surfaces; Cloud Shadows); River Fog (Light Graded by Atmospheric Density); The Chant (Gradation through Values of Separated Objects) The View-Metre Three Pictures Found with the View-Metre View Taken with a Wide Angle Lens Photography Nearing the Pictorial The Path of the Surf—Photo (Triangles Occuring in the leading line); The Shepherdess—Millet (Composition Exhibiting a Double Exit) Circular Observation—The Principle; The Slaying of the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... to the "Canterbury Tales" we know that the observations could not have been recorded except at complete hours, because the construction of the metre will not admit the supposition of any parts of hours having ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... readily lend themselves to this mode of expression, and we may be thankful that none of his successors except Empedocles followed his example. It has the very great inconvenience of making it necessary to use different words for the same thing to suit the exigencies of metre. And if there ever was an argument that demanded precise statement, it was that of Parmenides. As it is, his poem has the faults we should look for in a metrical version of Euclid. On the other hand, Parmenides is the first philosopher of whom we have sufficient ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... rhymer who had any skill in it passed for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying at all, were honored with marks of distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances which ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... metre told me his best pupil was a woman of noble family and a poetess besides—Balbilla ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Iliad in hexameters, no man can tell; but having done so, he thereby constituted for ever the proper metre of Greek—and Latin—Epic poetry. But what a multitude of subjects, how different from one another does that, and every other Epic poem, comprehend! Glory to the hexameter! it suits them all. Now, in every Epic poem, and in few more than in the Iliad, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... publication rarely indicates the date of composition. Only sixteen of the thirty-seven plays commonly assigned to Shakespeare were published in his lifetime, and it is questionable whether any were published under his supervision. {48} But subject-matter and metre both afford rough clues to the period in his career to which each play may be referred. In his early plays the spirit of comedy or tragedy appears in its simplicity; as his powers gradually matured he depicted life in its most complex involutions, and portrayed with masterly insight the subtle ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... to apply philosophy to all the arts of life, decreed, that no public road in France should exceed an inclination of 4 deg. 46', or rise more than one metre in twelve. This proportion, it was estimated, would combine the maxima and minima of the powers; and, in spite of those malignant confederacies which he was so often called upon to overthrow, the labour of reducing many steep roads of France to this ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... I altogether wrong About the brain, Dreaming I hear the British tongue? Dear Heaven! what a rhyme! And yet 'tis all as good As some that I have fashioned in my time, Like bud and wood; And on the other hand you couldn't have a more precise or neater Metre. ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... long thou shalt stay?' Devastator of the day! Know, each substance and relation, Thorough nature's operation, Hath its unit, bound and metre; And every new compound Is some product and repeater,— Product of the earlier found. But the unit of the visit, The encounter of the wise,— Say, what other metre is it Than the meeting of the eyes? Nature poureth into nature Through the channels of that feature, Riding on the ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that we should try to attribute the times of the year to children; their likeness is so rife among annuals. For man and woman we are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without renewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that we look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children—for a waxing that shall come again another ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... passing of years dim the ruddy glow of that hearth-fire, nor the charm of the poem. The simplicity of metre, the purity of wording, the gentle sadness of some of its expressions, make us read between the lines the deep and affectionate reminiscence with ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... they no natural idea of what is useless? None of what is harsh, cramped, lame, or superfluous? When verses are being repeated, the whole theatre raises an outcry if there is one syllable too few or too many. Not that the mob knows anything about feet or metre; nor do they understand what it is that offends them, or know why or in what it offends them. But nevertheless nature herself has placed in our ears a power of judging of all superfluous length and all undue shortness in sounds, as much as of grave ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... away. The person in the taxi-cab might have been observed searching his pockets curiously, and to be counting what money he found therein as he cast anxious glances toward the dial of the taxi-metre. ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... lives in my brain. I did not know, in that delirium of exaltation which a poetic discovery always makes in the heart of a youth, whether most to admire the bold artifice of the man who had adapted an unrhymed Persian metre—the Pearl—to the needs of a poem in the broadest Dorsetshire dialect, or the deep intensity of the emotion with which he had clothed a ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... likelihood or must happen of necessity. The Poet and the Historian are not different because one writes in verse and the other in prose. Turn what Herodotus tells into verse, and none the less it will be a sort of history; the metre makes no difference. The real difference lies in the Historian's telling what has happened, the Poet's telling what may happen. Thus Poetry is a more philosophical thing, and a more serious, than History: for Poetry tells of the Universal, History of the Particular. Now the business ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... simple excitement and pure inspiration, As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowing If 'twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing; Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection, While, borne with the rush of the metre along, The poet may chance to go right or go wrong, Content with the whirl and delirium of song; Then his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes, And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes, Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white-heats When the heart ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... into this confusion: "The mere matter of all poetry—to wit, the appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men—being unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme, cadence, and what not, to this invariable material." What has become here of the substance of Paradise Lost—the story, scenery, characters, sentiments as they are in the poem? They have vanished clean away. Nothing is left but the form on one side, and on the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... a history of English poetry, but relinquished the design to Warton, to whom he communicated an outline of his own plan. The "Observations on English Metre" and the essay on the poet Lydgate, among Gray's prose remains, are apparently portions ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... "In each other's arms;" the apostrophe being misplaced, and the metre improperly allowed to exclude a word which the sense requires. Now, as to the plural of each other, although we do not use the objective, and say of many, "They love each others," there appear to be some instances ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Arimazes. Notwithstanding the Shower, he continued in the Garden, and never quitted it, till he had found one Moiety of the Tablet, which was unfortunately broke in such a Manner, that even the half Lines were good sense, and good Metre, tho' very short. But what was still more remarkably unfortunate, they appear'd at first View, to be a severe satyr upon the ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... sight up away through the fissure of the rocks. The rhythm (to touch one of the various things) the rhythm of that 'Duchess' does more and more strike me as a new thing; something like (if like anything) what the Greeks called pedestrian-metre, ... between metre and prose ... the difficult rhymes combining too quite curiously with the easy looseness of the general measure. Then 'The Ride'—with that touch of natural feeling at the end, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... In the same primitive metre as these dedications is the Song of the Arval Brothers, which was found engraved on a stone in the grove of the goddess Dea Dia, a few miles outside of Rome. This hymn the priests sang at the May festival of the goddess, when the farmers brought them the first fruits of the earth. ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... Compare a poem of William Morris with one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne's Songs and Sonnets with Matthew Arnold's Obermann; Rudyard Kipling's Ballads with The Light of Asia. Have they any common standard of form, any type of metre? The purists doubt as to the style of Carlyle as a "model," but no one denies that the French Revolution and Hero-Worship, at least in certain passages, display a mastery over language as splendid as anything in our prose literature. Exactly the same might be said also ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... special place when writing of "Sweet Auburn," it was probably Lissoy, in Ireland, where he grew up; but the village of his imagination is lovelier than any actual spot, and there is no use in hunting for it on the map. See the first note on The Traveller for remarks on metre, etc. ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... striking reality and directness of this lyric, its immense emotional undercurrent, and its abrupt, almost gasping metre, admirably suited to the impassioned mood of the speaker,—these are a few of the qualities that combine to make "A Woman's Thought" one of the most remarkable poems ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... of repetitions in the tune, and has a chorus that is sung at the end of each verse. I have not presumed to arrange it in metre; but the following is the substance: "We are assembled in the habiliments of war, and will go in quest of our enemies. We will march to their land and spoil their possessions. We will take their women and children, and lead them into captivity. The warriors shall fall by our ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... methods now govern the Muses, The modes of expression have changed with the times; That low is the rank of the poet who uses The old-fashioned verse with intentional rhymes. And quite out of date, too, is rhythmical metre; The critics declare it an insult to art. But oh! the sweet swing of it, oh! the clear ring of it, Oh the great pulse of it, right from the heart, Art ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... none example in English metre so well mayntayning this figure (Exargasia, or the Gorgeous) as that dittie of her Majestie Queen Elizabeth's own making, passing sweete and harmonical; which figure being, as his very original name purporteth, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... James; looking, however, rather proudishly at what I had said, and replacing his glasses on the brig of his nose, he then read us a screed of metre to the following effect; part of which, I am free to confess, is rather above ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... "It was at all times day, and the blacks grew weary." Norralie considered and decided that the sun should disappear at intervals. He addressed the sun in an incantation (couched like the Finnish Kalewala in the metre of Longfellow's Hiawatha); and the incantation is thus interpreted: "Sun, sun, burn your wood, burn your internal substance, and go down". The sun therefore now burns out his fuel in a day, and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... when, like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good things to fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... struggles and victories in the land of promise. The women listen, nodding and swaying their bodies sympathetically. He works himself into a frenzy, in which the fiddlers vainly try to keep up with him. He turns and digs the laggard angrily in the side without losing the metre. The climax comes. The bride bursts into hysterical sobs, while the women wipe their eyes. A plate, heretofore concealed under his coat, is whisked out. He has conquered; the inevitable collection is ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... original Greek phrase was [Greek: elpidos leptes], which Euripides has changed to [Greek: asthenous rhomes], though the other had equally suited the metre. But Euripides is fond of slight alterations in ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... you to pull the police magistrate's nose.' When Tennyson says of the men of the Light Brigade 'Theirs but to do and die,' the expression seems to me perfectly lucid. 'Up to them to do and die' would alter the metre without especially clarifying the meaning. This is an example of ordinary language being quite adequate; but there is a further difficulty that even wild slang comes to sound like ordinary language. Very often the English have already as humorous and fanciful idiom ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... different Soteltes (or Devices at the end of each course), and omits Russell's description of his four of the Four Seasons, p. 51-4; and does not alter the metre of the lines describing the Dinners as he does, p. 50-5. —Differs from R., nearly as ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... greening out from under wings of shadow, the mountain ranges holding hands about an immensity of space. It was one of our giant days to his emotions, and particularly memorable to him through the circumstance that it insisted on a record in verse, and he was unused to the fetters of metre: and although the verse was never seen by man, his attempt at it confused his ideas of his expressive powers. Oddly too, while scourging the lines with criticism, he had a fondness for them: they stamped a radiant day in his mind, beyond the resources ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... died, and in April of the following year, when he lost his father. He always had a strong feeling for art, both in subject and treatment, and was always very fastidious about his work; he would touch up a poem over and over again, and take the utmost pains with metre and "swing" until ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... is much in Heywood's humorous and satirical style: it is written in the English ballad-metre, and consists of seven seven-line stanzas, each stanza, as was not unusual with Heywood, ending with the same, or nearly the same, line. It ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.22 • Various
... but I was present, and the exercise made more impression upon me than it did upon either of the principal agents. My Father read the verse admirably, with a full,—some people (but not I) might say with a too full—perception of the metre as well as of the rhythm, rolling out the rhymes, and glorying in the proper names. He began, and it was a happy choice, with 'The Lady of the Lake'. It gave me singular pleasure to hear his large voice do justice to 'Duncrannon' and 'Cambus- Kenneth', and wake the echoes ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Chester Griswold, and Heaven pity her! Of course he's the greatest catch in America; but he's a prig and a snob, and he's so generous with his money that he'll give you five pennies for a nickel any time you ask him. He's got a heart like the metre of a taxicab, and he's jealous as a cat. Aline will have a fine time with Chester! I knew him at St. Paul's and at Harvard, and he's got as much red blood in him ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... happy discovery of the author, Richard Braithwait. I transcribe it from the MS. volume from which James Boswell first gave to the world Shakspeare's verses "On the King." Southey has somewhere said that "the best serious piece of Latin in modern metre is Sir Francis Kinaston's Amores Troili et Cressidae, a translation of the two first books of Chaucer's Poem[1]; but it was reserved for famous BARNABY to employ the barbarous ornament of rhyme, so as to give thereby point and character to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... The metre of the Chorus indicates marching; so that apparently the procession takes some time to move across the orchestra and get into position. Cassandra would be dressed, as a prophetess, in a robe of white reaching to the feet, covered by an agrenon, or net ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... 1700 and 1785—eighty-five years. Next comes a paper on passages from selected English verse and prose writings —the Statute discreetly avoids calling them literature—between 1200 and 1500, exclusive of Chaucer; with questions on language, metre, literary history and literary criticism: then a paper on Chaucer with questions on language, metre, literary history and literary criticism: lastly a paper on writing in the Wessex dialect of Old English, with questions on the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, language, metre ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... great laws of Divine government and human polity, that composition in the arts should strongly affect every order of mind, however unlearned or thoughtless. Hence the popular delight in rhythm and metre, and in simple musical melodies. But it is also appointed that power of composition in the fine arts should be an exclusive attribute of great intellect All men can more or less copy what they see, and, more or less, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... playful seals in the surf below, who seemed rather flattered by her attention, and would swim about, singing their sweetest songs to her alone. Passers-by were equally curious as to her, but a broken lyre gives forth no music, and her heart responded not with any more long metre hymns. ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... truth, just as with a 'nomenclator' audacity supplies the place of memory, and he invents a name for every one whose name he cannot recollect, so the poets think that it is of no importance to speak the truth, but are either forced by the exigencies of metre, or attracted by sweetness of sound, into calling every one by whatever name runs neatly into verse. Nor do they suffer for it if they introduce another name into the list, for the next poet makes them bear what name he pleases. That ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... constant metre of the orator. There are many audiences in every public assembly, each one of which rules in turn. If anything comic and coarse is spoken, you shall see the emergence of the boys and rowdies, so loud and vivacious, that you might think the house was filled with them. If new topics ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... with religious flourishes secular poetry, clothing itself in rhyme and metre, adopting every current form of poesy, and treating of every appropriate subject. Its first ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... barbarian twang, and it is particularly in the Psalms—which we have now been reading, and which might be ranked with the finest hymns—that I miss the number and rhythm of the syllables, the observance of a fixed metre—in short, severity of form. David, the royal poet, was no less possessed by the divinity when he sang to his lyre than other poets have been, but he does not seem to have known that delight felt by our poets in overcoming the difficulties ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... friend, who is wooed in mistake for herself by the suitor destined for her own hand. This is the main dramatic point; the thread is very slender, and is drawn out to its utmost limits through five acts of blank verse. The language and metre are scrupulously correct. But one cannot credit the play with any touch of poetry or imagination. It presents a trite theme tamely and prosaically. Congenital inability of the most inveterate toughness to appreciate dramatic poetry could alone account ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... it is worthless; but as a monument of our language it is beyond all price. In more than thirty thousand lines not more than fifty Norman words are to be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still only slightly affected by riming terminations; the similes are the few natural similes of Caedmon; the battle-scenes are painted with the same rough, ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... lights.'[28] Ashtavakra said, 'Four are the Asramas of the Brahmanas; the four orders perform sacrifices; four are the cardinal points; four is the number of letters; and four also, as is ever known, are the legs of a cow.'[29] Vandin said, 'Five is the number of fires; five are the feet of the metre called Punki; five are the sacrifices; five locks, it is said in the Vedas, are on the heads of the Apsaras; and five sacred rivers are known in the world.'[30] Ashtavakra said. 'Six cows, it is asserted by some, and paid as a gratuity on the occasion of establishing the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... like smiths at their forges Worked the red Saint George's Cannoneers; And the "villainous saltpetre" Rung a fierce, discordant metre Round their ears; As the swift Storm-drift, With hot sweeping anger, came the horseguards' clangor On our flanks. Then higher, higher, higher, burned the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... great, as to cause a land-slip in Pizzifalcone, by which several houses were overwhelmed; and, on another occasion, the torrent of rain was so violent, that the Riviera di Chiaja was covered, to the depth of half a metre, with mud, and stones brought down by the water from the heights above. This enormous quantity of water pouring on the slopes of Vesuvius, and percolating through the crust of the earth into the fiery ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... the metre has been too violently censured. He found the measure reformed in so many passages by the silent labours of some editors, with the silent acquiescence of the rest, that he thought himself allowed to extend a little ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... had carried off from the camp of Attila. The author of this poem is unknown, nor can I, on the vague and rather doubtful allusion to Thule, as Iceland, venture to assign its date. It was, evidently, recited in a monastery, as appears by the first line; and no doubt composed there. The faults of metre would point out a late date; and it may have been formed upon some local tradition, as Walther, the hero, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast." The invention of a house, safe against wild animals, frost, and heat, gives play to the finer faculties, and introduces art, manners, and social delights. The discovery of the post office is a fine metre of civilization. The sea-going steamer marks an epoch; the subjection of electricity to take messages and turn wheels marks another. But, after all, the vital stages of human progress are marked by steps toward personal, individual ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... sense of the passage and be similar in the number and form of the letters, nothing can be more unfortunate than the correction of "princely;" Mr. Collier, on the other hand, follows Steevens and Malone, and reads "princely," observing the Tieck's reading ("precise") "sounds ill as regards the metre, the accent falling on the wrong syllable. Mr. Collier's choice is determined by the authority of the second folio, which he considers ought to have considerable weight, whilst Mr. Knight regards the authority of that edition as very trifling; and the only point of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... permeates his poems. By temperament a singer as well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the singing voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no ideas that are not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and construct in verse, he is capable here and there of the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... received a short time ago a remarkable opinion from Carl Spitteler. He asserts that he is guided in his choice of definite styles and definite forms by an absolutely clear purpose; that he has, for example, essayed every kind of metre which could possibly be suited to his "cosmic" epic, or that he has written a novelette solely in order to have once written a novelette. Although in these confessions, as well as in Edgar Allen Poe's celebrated Poet's Art, self-delusion and pleasure in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... putting forth of his technical skill, but as the vital product of all the forces which sustain him. A real poem grows out of all that is deepest in a man's nature; to its making in spiritual conception, structure, form, and style his body, his mind, and his soul contribute; its metre adjusting itself to his breathing, its ideas taking direction and significance from his thought, and its elusive suggestiveness and beauty conveying something of his mysterious personality. A true sermon is never what is sometimes called a pulpit effort; ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... all that P Labatt said has come true. There is food for almost nothing, and people are starving here in St. Pierre; there is clothing for almost nothing, and poor girls cannot earn enough to buy a dress. The pretty printed calicoes (indiennes) that used to be two francs and a half the metre, now sell at twelve sous the metre; but nobody has any money. And if you read our papers,—Les Colonies, La Defense Coloniale,— you will find that there are sons wicked enough to beat their mothers: oui! yche ka batt manman! It is the malediction ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... me? And yet you have been reading my poems all this while!—There is renunciation in our words, renunciation in the metre, renunciation in our music. That is why fortune always forsakes us; and we, in turn always forsake fortune. We go about, all day long, initiating the youths in the sacred cult ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... you, Suzanne, Long since have won my heart; You break it, too, And leave the same to smart full sore Whenever you depart for Baltimore. You're charming;—and in metre I endeavour To say you are ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... the conventional pastoral did not, indeed, pass altogether unnoticed in their own day, for early in the sixteenth century Teofilo Folengo composed his Zanitonella in macaronic verse. It consists of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity. In the same manner Berni travestied the courtly pastoral of vernacular writers in his realistic pictures of village ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... story of the siege followed stereotyped lines except that the colossal nature of the fortifications entailed unprecedented sacrifice of life on the besiegers' part. The crucial point of the siege-operations was the capture of a position called 203-Metre Hill. This took place on November 30th after several days of the most terrible fighting ever witnessed, fighting which cost the Japanese ten thousand casualties. The importance of the hill was that it furnished a post of observation whence indications ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... for them; they seemed to enter heartily into the other portions of the service—but the psalms in metre are a great Shibboleth. My beadle, who always sat where he could command the congregation, has often assured me that when a psalm was announced he could soon tell the sheep ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... anxiously have I sought one striking original idea in the whole poem (appalling in its length), but to no purpose. The transcendental literature of Germany absorbs all that, at first glance, arrests the attention. Without learning, imagination, or the attraction of a beautiful metre (like that of Tennyson's 'Princess'), I am at a loss to know what has given this poem its notoriety. Not its daring speculation, surely, for it is but a timid compromise between Orthodoxy ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... I whistled for Old Clay, and back he comes, and I mounted and off, jist as the crowd came up. The folks looked staggered, and wondered a little grain how it was done so cleverly in short metre. If I didn't quilt him in no time, you may depend; I went right slap into him, like a flash of lightning into a gooseberry bush. He found his suit ready made and fitted afore he thought he was half measured. Thinks I, friend Bradley, ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the treatise on grammar. The others were only summaries, and are now lost. On the other hand, we have still the six books on music, likewise begun at Milan, which he finished, almost as an amusement, at Thagaste. They are dialogues between himself and his pupil, the poet Licentius, upon metre and scansion. But we know from himself that he intended to make this book longer, and to write a second part upon melody, that is to say, music, properly so called. He never found the time: "Once," he says, "the burthen of ecclesiastical affairs was placed ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... copy of the stanzas written by him in this metre at the time of the Union, (beginning "Zooks, Harry! zooks, Harry!") he entitled them, "An admirable new ballad, which goes excellently well ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... were! to rhyme with far A kind star did not tarry; The metre, too, was regular As schoolboy's dot and carry; And full they were of pious plums, So extra-super-moral,— For sucking Virtue's tender gums ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... such poems as William Morris' "Sigurd the Volsung". Prose has been selected as the medium of translation, since it is hardly possible to give an accurate rendering and at the same time to meet the demands imposed by rhyme and metre; at least, none of the verse translations made thus far have succeeded in doing this. The prose translations, on the other hand, mostly err in being too continuous and in condensing too much, so that they retell the story ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... text: Italicized stanzas will be indented 5 spaces. Italicized words or phrases will be capitalized. Lines longer than 75 characters have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Also, some obvious errors, after being confirmed against other ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... its essence, something rude and formless, became in the hands of Ronsard a Pindaric ode. He gave it structure, a sustained system, strophe and antistrophe, and taught it a changefulness and variety of metre which keep the curiosity always excited, so that the very aspect of it, as it [159] lies written on the page, carries the eye lightly onwards, and of which this is a ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... forms of literature and of inference from the two great epics which have come down to us. So reconstructed, the earliest period appears to us as a time of slow development in which the characteristic epic metre, diction, and structure grew up slowly from crude elements and were improved until the verge ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... distinction between poetry and prose cannot be justified, save in that of art and science. It was seen in antiquity that such distinction could not be founded on external elements, such as rhythm and metre, or on the freedom or the limitation of the form; that it was, on the contrary, altogether internal. Poetry is the language of sentiment; prose of the intellect; but since the intellect is also sentiment, in its concretion and reality, so all ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... quotation, merely showing the metre, would have no appeal to us; with all its perfection and its proportion, rhyme and cadence, it would only be a construction. But when it is the outer body of an inner idea it assumes a personality. The idea flows ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... 3. l. 5. —in Nishadha lord of earth. I have accented this word not quite correctly Nishadha, in order to harmonise with the trochaic flow of my metre. It appears to be the same as Nishadha-rashtra and Nishadha-desa. See Wilford's list of mountains, rivers, countries; from the Puranas and other books. Asiatic Researches, ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... perhaps the oldest specimen of English Gypsy at present extant, and perhaps the purest. They are at least as old as the time of Elizabeth, and can pass among the Zigany in the heart of Russia for Ziganskie. The other lines are not so ancient. The piece is composed in a metre something like that of the ancient Sclavonian songs, and contains the questions which two strange Gypsies, who suddenly meet, put to each other, and the ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... stated on the title-page to have been "lately acted by the right Honorable the Earle of Darby his servants." It has not been reprinted, and copies of the old quarto are exceedingly rare. There is an air of old-fashionedness about the diction and the metre that would lead us to suppose the play was written several years before the date of publication. The wearisome practice, in which the characters so freely indulge, of speaking in the third person is very characteristic of the earlier dramatists, notably of Greene. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various |
